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Tuesday, December 11, 2012

water, part 2.

My
life is the story of water. My cells, my mitochondria and riboplasm
and DNA swim in pools of water. I pour it into my body and still I
want more; I lust for it. It drives me forward, pulls my feet toward
its source. I swim under waterfalls and break the surface of a
crystal pool high in the mountains. I drink it deeply, let it fall
over me, into me, around me, and still I want more.

Though
I have moved often, I have lived most of my life in wet places.
Unintentionally, I am drawn to them, perhaps because I grew up in New
England's green summers, among plants and gardens fed by a generous
sky. In college I studied in Ireland, wrote papers while lying on
dew-covered fields beneath banks of clouds. Later, gone to the
Marshall Islands to teach, I happened upon the wettest and most
fertile island among thousands of parched white-sand beaches. The
seams of my clothing rotted in the humidity. Everything stank. Later
still, I went to live in southeast Alaska, to a place that receives
160 inches of rain a year. I moved up and down the misty, echoing
passages of the Tongass Forest one canoe stroke at a time, vainly
trying to stay dry in a world carved by water.

Thinking I needed to
dry out, I left Alaska and went to Hawaii, but inadvertently chose to
live on the eastern shore, the one deluged with rain and dripping
with waterfalls while black lava bakes in the sun on the west coast.
And now I have surpassed even my own standards, finding myself in one
of the wettest places in the world, a place that makes the Amazon
basin seem arid, a place that receives an average of 22 feet
of
rainfall each year.

Outside,
the rain is falling incessantly and has closed the Homer tunnel,
which provides the only road access to this remote corner of New
Zealand. We are stuck here in Milford Sound, rained in. New
waterfalls appear every time we look outside at the sheer cliff faces
surrounding us. They multiply by the hour, trickles of rain turning
to ribbons of mist, ribbons turning to cascades and cascades becoming
spouts of whitewater that run violently into the sea, creating
temporary microclimates at their bases.

Though
these sea cliffs are covered in green, there is virtually no soil
holding the plant life together, nothing to absorb this water that
pours from the sky. Lacking soil, the mountains shed rain like water
off a duck. Thousands of waterfalls appear, more than you ever
imagined, more than seem realistically feasible. They stream into the
sea, gathering tannins from plants on their way down. The brown,
tannin-rich freshwater floats atop the saltwater in a visible layer
that can be several feet deep and filters out sunlight, creating a
unique phenomena called deep water emergence, in which extreme
deep-water species are tricked into living in depths of just 30 feet.

Last
year was the driest summer on record in Milford Sound. The rivers ran
low and the layer of freshwater floating atop the saltwater shrank
and the peaks of the sea cliffs stood starkly gray against an
unwavering blue sky. Today, that world seems far away. The sky has
cleaved open and rain is pouring out of it and our kayaks lie
upsidedown on the gravel, waiting for the rivers to rise. Without
water, the granite walls of Milford Sound would resemble Yosemite's
blank rock faces, but thanks to massive rainfall they are blanketed
in vegetation. One in ten trees manages to bury its roots in a crack
in the granite. The others simply entwine their roots together,
spreading them over the thin layer of moss and ferns that clings to
the sheer cliffs. When it rains hard there are tree avalanches,
massive swaths of plant life ripped from its tenuous foothold and
sent crashing down into the sea. The mountainsides are streaked with
the scars of these avalanches, dark green where the oldest ones have
struck, lighter green for avalanches from 20 or so years ago, where
moss and ferns have started to grow back, and gray for the most
recent, where only bare rock has been left behind. It takes 80 to 150
years for the forest to re-establish itself.

This
is a place defined by water. My life is defined by water, so it is
fitting, perhaps, that I find myself here. But sometimes I feel the
rain is too much to take. I told someone at a party that I might be
growing moss myself, become moldy and waterlogged by living in so
many wet places. I was told, graciously, that I am not getting moldy.
I am glowing.

That
may or may not be true. But either way, I am ready for it to stop
raining.

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About Me

I'm Krista. I write stories about the intersection of people, places and nature. Formally, I'm a contributor at High Country News, a non-profit environmental news magazine once called "a scrappy institution that produces some of the finest journalism in the American West." My work has also been published in Slate, Orion, Alaska magazine, New Zealand Wilderness magazine, the Denver Post, Adventure Journal, and a number of other newspapers and websites. See more at www.kristaleelanglois.com.